Sneak Peek Monday!

It was going to be Sneak Peek Sunday, but I wasn't quick enough on getting this out. So you miss out on the alliteration, but you still get the sneak peek. Yay, you! I can't work on my awesome new cardi because I ran out of yarn, and I'm still waiting to get new stuff in. So I decided to share what I have because I'm just so darn excited. And you get two sneak peeks in one! We finally closed on our house, and I get a craft room! I can't wait to have my own space to mess up again. I will say, though, it's really sad to leave my craft room in Holly as we put so much time and effort and thought into it. *sigh*

We'll start with my new craft room since it's the less cool of my cool sneak peeks. This is my new craft room in the new house. There's not really anything in it so it may not be the greatest look, but it's got so much potential! I can't wait to fill it with my crafting things. It will definitely be epic. Epic, I tell you. Plus, I'll have a place for the Rayna Crafting Tornado to pass. I understand how these pictures are probably boring, but I can't help but picture all my crafting things and all the ideas that will be buzzing around in there. It gives me chills. :) My room has one very large closet and lots of space. And also two windows and a ceiling fan. Thrilling, I know. :)

On the other hand, we have my awesome new cardi. Once again, it's a free pattern on ravelry. (if it's free, it's me!) I heart free patterns. :) I'm not the kind to knit sweaters. I'm way too impatient for that. I get bored with long runs of doing the same thing so this pattern is perfect for me. It uses a bulky/super bulky yarn with giant needles. So it takes a fraction of the time that a normal sweater would. I chose Plymouth Yarn Baby Alpaca in a beautiful deep blue color, and it's sooooooo soft. I can't wait to live in this thing! This is what I have of the back panel. As you can see, it's got a really cool lattice pattern with some cables on the side. Now, tell me, have you ever seen anything like this in the store? Exactly. It's mine. Because of the yarn I chose, it's quite an expensive sweater, but I am strangely okay with that. In any case, I can't do anything until I get the remaining 8 hanks of yarn. This is 2, so far.

Please to enjoy my exclusive sneak peeks. :)

Special note: I took all the pictures here with my new phone, the LG Optimus. I freaking love this phone! It replaces my uber-crappy Samsung Reclaim. I am never buying Samsung again. I called them so many times with issues about my phone, and they didn't seem to care. So take that and stick it in your powdered donut, Samsung.

Cupcakes are crafts, too!

I'm trying my hand at a new hobby. Rayna, do you really need yet another hobby, I hear you say. One can never have too many hobbies. I find joy in many things so why should I limit myself? So there. Yes, another hobby. But this one's delicious... I'm making novelty cupcakes! Well, I've made one batch, at least. But I do plan on making more! Scott bought me a really neat book for a housewarming present (warm my house with cupcakes!), and it's got so many cool recipes in it. I'm definitely planning on making more. I've already planned things like Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthdays ( I can't decide if I want knitting or goldfish cupcakes for my birthday. Maybe knitting goldfish? Awesome!).

For those of you who know me, I hate cooking. Maybe not hate it, but I'm terrible at it. I mess up macaroni and cheese, and I usually eat ramen when it's just me. I cannot cook. I will not cook. Although, I have been making Joey's food. That's beside the point, though. I can puree anything. That's not hard. So, anyway, cupcakes. Mmm, cupcakes. This book has everything in it. There are several recipes for cupcakes, which is good because I like everything in one place. There are also a bunch of frosting recipes. I went kind of cheap on that front. I bought frosting. :) Hey, you have to start somewhere. :) It's just as delicious, I can assure you. I'll get to making my own.

I made the Bake Sale Pies. Delicious! Anything with M&Ms is a hit with me. This was also marked as an "ez" recipe so it was a good place to start. There are so many cupcakes I want to make in this book. There are cupcakes that look like eggs, monsters, jungle animals, whales and bees, just to mention a few. Of course, there are also things you wouldn't want to eat. For some reason, there is a recipe for cupcakes with roaches on top of them and cupcakes that look like nasty rats. Ew. Definitely do NOT want to eat. This book has all the techniques and recipes you need to know to make their cupcakes. I love it! As you can see, Scott and Joey loved them, too. These cupcakes make a great snack! ;)

The Frog Prince

I can't believe it's November already! We had a wonderful October as we took our boy trick-or-treating for the first time. It was so much fun! We have since moved to Ohio, but we haven't yet moved into our house. Preemptively, we trick-or-treated around the new neighborhood where we will be living very soon I hope. We met a bunch of the neighbors, and we got candy, of course. It was awesome! On that note, the craft for this time was Joey's costume. I knit him the cutest little frog costume. I, personally, thought it was genius. :) Plus, none of the other kids had the same costume.
I got this pattern from a book called Wacky Baby Knits, and, despite all the problems other people had with it, I had a great time knitting it. When it comes to knitting, I just trust the pattern. Even if it doesn't make sense to me at the time, I always just do what it tells me. It always turns out. :) I wish everything worked out that way! There were a couple times I had to check the ravelry forum to see what other people thought of the pattern, but then I just went for it. Sure, I'll make the frog eyes just like I made the frog eyelids. It doesn't make any sense, but I'll figure it out. I'm usually one to make it up as I go, anyway. Everything turned out fine, as you can see. The pattern was free, by the way. I'm sure you can google Wacky Baby Knits along with frog or you can just go straight to ravelry (if you have an account) and look it up there. Ravelry is definitely my go-to place for patterns. Google is kind of a waste of time that way.

Scott also had a hand in this, and I always value his design opinion, but he really helped with this one. The pattern had me stitching the black part of the eyes. We went button shopping for all the buttons to close up the legs and the collar, and Scott found the coolest green froggy eyes! They match the yarn perfectly, and they really just made the outfit. So, thank you, baby. :) Your input was invaluable.
I hope everyone had as much fun this Halloween as I did. We're finally starting to move into our new house! We should close on Monday so I can't wait to get my craft room back. I'll have to post new pictures! I get my own room with a ginormous closet! Hurray, me! I hope everyone's looking forward to the holiday season. I finished knitting Scott's Christmas presents, and I have to start work on Joey's sometime soon. I'm hoping I'll be able to wait until we get into the new place. For now, I'm working on something for me. ;)

For My Favorite Baby Momma

This post is a very special one because I get to announce... dun, dun, dun... my sister-in-law's pregnant! As you may have noticed, I go gaga over babies, and this is an extra special baby because they will be my very own niece/nephew! I can't tell you how excited I really am so I am dedicating this post to my very favorite family right now: Jen and Kevin Ehlert and the little bun in the oven. :) I haven't had a lot of time to do yarn crafts for the little bugger, yet, but I have definitely been inspired by Jen herself. I found the coolest stamp at Michael's in the $1 bin (Yay, $1 bin!), and it really brings out the fun in pregnancy. :) I had a lot of fun with this stamp. I made my own paper print by stamping a really fun curlique-type stamp in red, and then I stamped the little pregnancy dress on top of it and cut it out. This is a super fun technique called fussy cutting. It's one of my favorites! Then I made it even more fun and whimsical by stamping it on the paper print again and cutting out the bottom part of the dress so I could pop it out with a 3d dot tape. I thought Jen would love the realism. :) I also heart rhinestones so, of course, I had to add some of those.

I also made the envelope myself so I could coordinate with the card (for themed party coordinations, hint, hint... ;)). I used my much-loved cricut to cut out the envelope and stamped the same curlique-type stamp from the card on the corners of the envelope. Then, instead of adding rhinestones (because I'm sure they would fall off the outside of the envelope), I colored the little circles red.
There are a couple things I love about this card. One, I made it. Call me egotistical or whatever you'd like, but it's genius. Two, it's a little less baby (although we all know babies are indeed wonderful) and more a celebration of pregnancy and the beginning of motherhood. In other words, it's more about Jen! So, yes, we're all really thrilled about a new baby, and we can't wait to meet them, but it's also always fun to be celebrated and spoiled a little yourself. :) So this one's for you, Jen. We'll get to the baby when they get here. :)

To go back a bit, there was a card I made a while back that was also inspired by Jen. Her nickname is Jenny Bee. I guess I don't actually know if it's Jenny B or Jenny Bee, but in any case, she likes bees. So, for the sake of argument, it's Jenny Bee. I was trying to come up with some themes for a baby card, and baby bee sounded so cute! So we'll give this one to you, too. :) You're just so inspiring! This one was fun because I also made my own paper print, and I got to use some embellishments I don't normally use in the wire and the button. Plus, kraft paper is the best.

So, this post, dear Ehlerts is for all 3 of you! But mostly Jen. Take all the time you can get together because it will disappear quickly when you have a little one. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but store up face-time with each other because between sleeping and work and baby, you may not see each other for a little while. :) But you know who you can call for help, should you need it! Crazy Aunt Rayna will be on the move...

The Fabled Follow-Through

I did it! I, who never follow through with (hardly) anything, have finished something I said I would do. And I can safely say it was all thanks to... da, da, da, dum... Couch 2 5k! I followed the program for 9 weeks, and while there were some rough practices, I finished the program and went on to run my first 5k in... forever. A long time, in any case. I did the Raise the Roof 5k benefiting Cincinnati's Habitat for Humanity, and the course was at Sharon Woods, which was SUPER HARD! It was crazy hilly, and it went through some really pretty woods (as you might have gathered from the name of the park). My boys were there to cheer me on, and I don't think I could have done it without them, either. While I didn't reach my personal goal of finishing within 30 minutes (I finished in 35:38), I did a pretty good job, and I only walked twice for a very short distance. Oh, and I picked it up at the end. :)

Oh, and the whole point of this post was to display my headband I knitted just for this occasion. I thought it would help my inner get-up-and-go if I made something special for myself to get me motivated, and it really did. I made this beautiful headband, and it's one of the many free patterns I've gotten off ravelry. By the way, if you're a fiber crafter, and you're not on ravelry, you're seriously depriving yourself of something wonderful and pure. So do it. I used this really nice thick wool yarn in my favorite crafting color: grey! I know grey sounds like such a boring color medium, but it's so versatile. And this thing is super soft. I doubled the yarn because I wasn't sure about the lace in a headband I wanted to keep the cold out of my ears, and that did the job. It worked great, and I actually ended up taking it off the last mile and using it to wipe the sweat off my forehead. It worked great for that, too. :) In addition to the beautiful, soft grey yarn I used, I used a very cool wood-like button for the back closure. The headband took no time at all to make, and I would recommend this pattern to anyone! It was great to work with it, and I loved the end result. If you're going to make it, the thing does stretch so don't worry about gauge too terribly much.

I'm really glad I did this, and I'm actually thinking of doing more 5ks. I'm kind of worried that now that I have no goal in mind, I'll stop working out. I can't let myself do that! I will NOT let myself do that. Oh, and I have to eat better. I'll be working on that. So today's lesson is to get up and go outside! I know it's hot, but you can do it. You will feel better, I promise. Unless you pass out from heat stroke, but I trust you to listen to your body and go inside if you start to feel sick. Okay? Okay. If I can do it, you can! (I'm a lazy bum. :))

Time to Accessorize

So we've been traveling a lot, lately, and I can't really craft. That means I have to find something I can do on the road (or in the hotel) and something that will also dress up my travel gear. Enter knit and crochet flowers. I've made some of these before, but I hadn't thought about putting them on all sorts of things. They're really easy, though, and I love them. :) So that makes it awesome. I bought 100 Flowers to Knit and Crochet by Some Lady (google it, you'll find it), and it's got the most amazing flower, leaf, fruit/vegetable, bug and leaf designs. I've been piecing together flowers to make little corsage-type things. The most recent one I made was a bouquet of trillium (They're called something else in the book, but I made them white, and now they're trillium! Voila.) with 2 large leaves and 1 small. You probably wouldn't know that if you saw it, but that's what they're called in the book: large and small leaves. I think it looks awesome on my suitcase. :)

There's really not a whole heck of a lot for me to craft right now, theoretically speaking. I can't do any of my paper crafts right now (bah!), and there are only limited knitting/crocheting capabilities because I don't want to be carting around skeins and skeins of yarn. Plus, I have a Halloween costume to finish, and that really needs to take priority. I can't wait to show that one off! Trust me, that'll be a lot more exciting than a tiny corsage. :) This was a really fun project, though, and it made me slightly more excited about moving all my crap to another state. I definitely plan on making more of these. I think I'm going to try wearing one in my hair next time. Something fall-y. We'll see how that works out.

Joey and the Eggplant

Have become great friends since I introduced them almost 2 weeks ago. They like to play together, roll around together and the eggplant likes to be chewed. Joey is more than happy to oblige. It all started with a promise I made Joey when he was around 4 months old. I promised him that I would make him an eggplant for his 6 month birthday. I like to think Joey loves it. :)

It may be unnecessary to say this for those who know me, but I have recently become obsessed with amigurumi knitting. You can knit your own toys! It's awesome! How many children out there have a stuffed eggplant? I would challenge you to find one. Plus, it's so well-constructed. ;) It's soft, there aren't any parts that will pop off and choke him, and it's got a really fun stem that he can chew on and hang on to so he can swing it around and hit people.

I have the most wonderful book of amigurumi knitting written by Hansi Singh. This is the second pattern I've used from this book, the first one being the Garden Snail, which was also awesome. Joey really likes that one, too. He likes to chew on the snail's antennae. The eggplant was a super easy pattern to follow, and I would recommend it to EVERYONE. The only thing to brush up on may be picking up stitches, but there's an entire section on this in the book. Everything you need to know can be found IN THIS BOOK. It's awesome. I absolutely hate it when I get a book that has specialized stitches (triple treble crochet clusters, for example, 100 Flowers to Knit and Crochet...), and you have to bring along an additional reference book to be able to figure out those wonky stitches. For my amigurumi knitting, I need only one book. It's heaven. :) The patterns are just so unique and fun, too. What child wouldn't want a stuffed jackalope? I have at least 2 other patterns currently planned for this book. I bought yarn for Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster (this one's for me), and I want to make a spider for Joey for Halloween. That one may be a little late since we're A) in the process of moving into a new house and currently living in a hotel and B) I'm already knitting him a costume for Halloween. You'll have to wait and see what it is. :)
In any case, I highly recommend this book as it is wonderfully fun and quirky, and Hansi Singh is a friggin' genius. Yes, some of the patterns seem pretty challenging (I love to read knitting patterns before bedtime), but challenges are fun! It always feels good to accomplish something like this. Happy knitting!